Research In Motion has revealed a new cloud-based BlackBerry Messenger service for socially connected music fans, called BBM Music.

The BBM Music service is designed to allow social and viral music discovery by allowing users to build a dynamic, community-based music library that can be shared amongst BBM Music friends.

Users create their own communities by inviting BBM friends to join their BBM Music Community and the size of the music libraries contained in these communities grows as more users are added and friends' music collections are also available to listen to.

"More than 45 million customers already love the social communication benefits delivered through BBM and we are thrilled to be extending the experience into a uniquely social and interactive music service," said Mike Lazaridis, president and Co-CEO at Research In Motion. "We have partnered with leading music companies to provide a ‘full track' music sharing and discovery experience that will provide users with quality music on demand and allow them to connect with friends on a whole new level."

Each user can select music from a catalogue with millions of songs from leading music companies such as Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI.

"We are pleased to be partnering with Research In Motion on their BBM Music service. RIM and its large base of BlackBerry Messenger users represent an exciting platform for expanding the reach of commercial digital music around the world," said Thomas Hesse, president, Global Digital Business, US Sales and Corporate Strategy, Sony Music Entertainment. "The combination of a premium music solution and instant messaging will enable viral music discovery and emphasise the social power of digital music. It also offers an effective way of serving younger consumers by integrating music into the fabric of an important hub of their digital activity."

BBM Music allows users to build a personal music profile with 50 of their top songs; this profile can be refreshed by changing up to 25 songs every month.

Company Articles

BBM Music also allows users to comment on friends' playlists and songs and allows multiple playlists to be created.

Users can create playlists in their own profiles and on friends' profiles, and with one click users can shuffle the entire collection of music from the BBM Music Community. You can even see which friend contributed each song while it plays.

Within the BBM Music app, there is a visual timeline that shows the recent updates of all users within a community, giving a chronological view of community updates, including who added new friends, which songs were added or removed, which playlists were created and what comments were made by your BBM Music friends.

Users are also able to listen to tracks offline, by saving them to their smartphone.

Cloud music service provider, Omnifone, is providing RIM with a back-end solution for the BBM Music service that provides content management, music hosting and reporting functions.

"A major component of online music continues to be about community, and the ability to discover new artists and music through word of mouth," said Rob Wells, president of Global Digital Business for Universal Music Group. "BBM Music dynamically and elegantly integrates the excitement of this social music discovery process with a high quality music service, enabling tens of millions of BlackBerry users to experience new music and to share those experiences with their friends virtually anywhere and at anytime."

A closed beta trial of the BBM Music service has been started today in Canada, the United States and the UK and the service is expected to be commercially available to customers later this year for a monthly subscription of $4.99 in Australia, Canada, Columbia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, the United Kingdom and the United States.